Contents
OPENING REEL: LIGHTS
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SECOND REEL: CAMERA
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FINAL REEL: ACTION
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For Victoria Birt
OPENING REEL
LIGHTS
As I sit here on this balcony, watching the sea, I wonder what was real and what was imagined. Memory is like a dream. Like a film.
Some of it is documented, I suppose. The film itself (whose title, Innocence, is not without significance in this story) serves as proof that I was there, and did those things. But those reels of celluloid reflect more than just a two-dimensional image of me. Like them, I am a collection of pieces, almost but not quite the same as one another, progressing towards The End – those white words on the black screen. And as I go, I pass by the light that brings the film to life. Not the artificial light of a projector, but the real light of the sun, the bleached buildings, and this enormous sky.
Did you know that for each second that we live, twenty-four frames of film pass over the projector’s beam? It doesn’t sound like very many, does it? Even a hundred and one frames, the number that made up my very first appearance before the camera, only produce just over four seconds of moving picture.
What can you do in four seconds? Not much, you might think. But that is the time it took for my life to be changed. A hundred and one pieces of me, paraded before the world without my knowledge. Those four seconds of film took me apart, frame by frame. But now, here I am, together again. And frame by frame, I’ll tell you the story.
I’ve always been a dreamer. In the days when I was scarcely taller than the hay grass, I was never a skinny child in a faded frock and pinafore, but the Princess of the Hay Field, or Queen of the Kingdom of the Cowshed, or wherever I had trailed my father that day. And later, when other village girls began to “walk out” with village boys, their whispered he said – I said accounts left me unmoved. I was waiting for something else to find me. Something not necessarily better than my family life in Haverth, since I loved both people and place, but definitely different. Something that might happen to the people I knew who didn’t live in Haverth but lived inside my head. They were not farmers or shopkeepers or blacksmiths. They were the people in the films.
Ever since I had seen my first moving picture as a little girl in the church hall at Aberaeron, I had never stopped being amazed by the sight of real people moving on a flat white screen. One of Mam’s favourite stories was of her own first visit to what she called the “kinema”, years before. “We couldn’t believe it!” she would say. “People were running up to look behind the screen, trying to see where the pictures were coming from, and how they moved, just as if they were living. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.”
At the old “kinema”, the people and horses in the film had walked jerkily, and unnaturally fast. The picture had flickered – brighter, then dimmer, then brighter again – as if illuminated by a guttering candle. It had seemed to struggle to stay within the bounds of the screen. “Bits of it would be on the wall,” recalled Mam, “or on someone’s face. It was funny, really, though marvellous as well. We were like children, watching those silly comic films that only lasted about five minutes, and clapping at the end, as if the people who made them could hear us!”
To me, even though the black and white made the world on the screen look so different from real life, it was still a miracle to see faraway places, sport and dancing and acrobatics, buildings and machines and animals. And what I loved best of all was that the pictures, or in my brother Frank’s slang, “the flicks”, were so new. They made you feel you were truly alive, striding through the twentieth century in a skirt shorter than any your mother or grandmother had worn, and with a head full of possibilities never before imagined.
Nowadays, the people on screen walk at the right speed, though the picture still flickers and jumps about a little, and even stops altogether sometimes. Frank, whose fascination for films leans more to the mechanical side than mine, met my questions about this with scorn: “What, do you think a film is shown by some sort of magic, girl? No, they are shown by a machine, and a machine can’t see what it’s doing, can it?”
I had to admit the truth of this. “So if the film stops, and the machine goes wrong, a man has to be there to see to it, then, has he?”
“Of course,” said Frank, adding with authority, “he’s called the projectionist.” Then, with longing, “I think he’s got the best job in the world.”
Frank was two years older than me. We had always been companions, and unlike some brothers, he never excluded me from the things he was interested in. Though he was a farmer’s son, he was a “war child”, as I was myself. Born in the early years of the twentieth century, our lives had been changed by the Great War. Those four years stood like a monolith between the world of our parents and our own. The speed with which inventions were developing was almost alarming. Mr Reynolds, the headmaster, and Reverend Morris, the vicar, had telephones, and a public telephone box had even been installed on the quay at Aberaeron. People flew in aeroplanes. Faster and faster trains went to every part of Great Britain and all over Wales, to Anglesey in the North and Pembroke in the South, bringing things we had never had before. Bananas were the latest; Frank couldn’t get enough of them.
Everything had changed. For generations, Freebodys had been tenant farmers, along with most of the families around us. But Frank did not see himself as a farmer, and I did not see myself as a farmer’s wife. Greater, or at least new, things beckoned in this new, mechanized world. For Frank, especially. He liked films, but more than anything, he wanted to be a motor mechanic. And just like me, he dreamed. He would pretend to kick-start his battered old bicycle as if it were a motorcycle, and vrmm-vrmm his way down the lane. I laughed, but I understood.
When I w
as fifteen and Frank was seventeen, our parents took us to the Pier Pavilion Café in Haverth to see The Bohemian Girl, with Gladys Cooper and Ivor Novello. My da, who was fond of quoting poetry, told me on the way home that the film was “such stuff as dreams are made on”. And he was quite right. It was from that day on that films became the centre of my dreams. Not baffling, disjointed night-time dreams, but the dreams of stolen moments when I was alone. Throwing feed to the hens, I ceased to be Princess Sarah of the Hen Run and became Gladys Cooper or Gloria Swanson or Mary Pickford, scattering corn against a backdrop of American, not Welsh, mountains, my dress billowing around my legs, my hair in curls, to be noticed by Rudolph Valentino or Ronald Colman and swept into love and adventure. Most often, whether I was doing my chores or sitting on the gate, or reading, or walking to the shop, I dreamed of my favourite actress of all, the beautiful Lillian Hall-Davis.
Her name sounded upper-class, though I knew that before she became an actress in the films she had been an ordinary girl like me. When she was on the screen, I was transfixed by the way she moved and smiled and interacted with the hero. She was bold yet ladylike, sweet yet fiery, and so attractive that I never questioned that he would, of course, fall in love with her. I dreamed of her whenever I was bored, which was often. And I envied her. She had made her escape from a poor area of London and become a famous actress, a “star”, as the film magazines said. I liked the handsome men in the films, but my imagination was filled with Lillian. And when no one was looking at me, I was her.
“But you’re always an attendant!”
“Not this year, Flo.”
Florence Price had been chosen as May Queen of Haverth. The previous year, it was Mary Trease. Even though I had been a May Queen attendant four times, I had no part to play in the May Day Parade of 1925 at all.
“Why not?” asked Florence.
I stopped threading privet branches round bits of wire, which was hurting my hands anyway.
“You know why not. Mr Reynolds said to give some other girls a turn.”
“Mr Reynolds! He—”
“I know what he’s like, but he’s the headmaster and he chooses.”
Florence sighed discontentedly. “I’ve always thought the vicar should choose, I have.” When I did not reply, she sighed again, louder. “At this rate, you’ll be too old to be the May Queen, ever.”
“Flo, I’m eighteen, not eighty!”
She digested this, busy with the garland. “But I am seventeen. And last year, when you and Mary were both seventeen, he chose Mary.” She looked up, her freckled face indignant. “It isn’t fair!”
“No, it isn’t,” I agreed. “And it’s especially unfair this year, considering.”
“Oh, Sarah!” Florence was dismayed. “You mean the film, don’t you?”
We were sitting in a front pew of the church, our feet surrounded by foliage. Privet, laurel and hawthorn had to be woven into strands to garland the cart that would carry the May Queen and her attendants through the village. It would be decorated with flowers first thing on Monday morning, and more flowers would be placed in the horses’ bridles and the girls’ hair. This year, thrillingly, it was rumoured that a moving picture was going to be made of the parade.
“I’m sure it’s just gossip,” I told Florence.
She shrugged. “Perhaps. But Mr Reynolds told Mr Hopkins the newsreel people want to come and film it. And Mr Hopkins told my da, and my da told us.”
I tried to remember what I had seen on the newsreels at Aberaeron: a football match, a politician speaking on a platform (though as films had no sound, the content of his speech was written on the screen), fashionable women in London, an unemployed men’s march in some European country. Would anyone watching a newsreel really want to see a May Day parade in a village in the middle of Wales?
“It does seem a pity,” mused Florence as she worked. “Greenery looks so dull in the films, all grey and blurry. No one will see the beautiful colours of the flowers.”
“But they’ll see you, Flo!” I exclaimed. “You’ll be up there looking lovely, and if it does get put on a newsreel, people all over Great Britain will see you and say to the person sitting next to them, ‘There’s a lovely girl, Mavis!’ Or George, or whoever. Won’t they?”
She grinned, her hands busy with the foliage but her blue eyes on my face. “Oh, Sarah! You and your films!”
Monday dawned misty, and by mid-morning a drizzle had set in.
“Good for the flowers,” said Da, standing back to scrutinize the May Queen’s cart. It was his job to drive it at the head of the parade. “I’ll put some blossom in my cap, shall I?”
Frank was leaning against the gatepost, scowling. “They’ll never come and make a moving picture in this weather,” he said. “Just when we had a chance to do something interesting, bloody Welsh weather goes and spoils it.”
“You watch your tongue, Frank,” said Da. He looked down at his muddy boots. “It’ll be a while yet before it lets up, though. You girls had better watch your good shoes.”
I was not sure I even wanted to wear my good shoes, or my best dress. Like Frank, I had been excited at the prospect of film-makers in the village. If they were not going to come, I wondered if I might put on my coat and boots, and keep dry. “Florence is going to need an umbrella,” I told Da gloomily. “You’d better put some blossom on that, too.”
“Cheer up, girl!” He slapped me lightly on the back. “At least you’re not going to be up there in the rain in a thin dress! Maybe next year, eh?”
But by midday the rain had stopped, though the sky remained blank and greyish-white. I put on my dress and shoes, and my new hat. My reflection showed how narrow the close-fitting cloche hat made my face, and how large my eyes looked beneath its brim. I combed out some curls in front of my ears, but that made me look like a girl with side whiskers, so I tucked them back in. I touched my lips with the precious lipstick I had saved for and bought at the chemist in Aberaeron, then twisted it back down into its brass tube and stood back. There was little else I could do to make myself look more alluring; my dress was as fashionable as the pattern Mam had made it from would allow, my stockings were silk, my shoes, though second-hand, were not very worn, and newly polished. I thought I looked all right.
The street was full of puddles. I picked my way between them, my excitement growing. Men were setting up tables for the May Day supper, women were bringing baskets of food, children scampered everywhere, shrieking and getting in the way. There was no sign of Flo or her attendants, but I saw Mary Trease standing by the pump and waved to her. She smiled and came towards me, clutching her handbag. Her dress, of a pale lemon, silky material, fluttered around her knees.
“You look nice, Mary!” I told her. “What a pretty dress!”
“It belongs to my cousin down in Cardiff,” she confessed. “But she’s got lots of dresses. Sarah, do you think they’ll come?”
“The film people? I hope so!”
“Let’s you and I go and watch for them, shall we?”
Ihad nothing better to do, so I walked with Mary to where the road made its final bend between Aberaeron and Haverth. Our village was on a slight hill, so from here we could see all the way to the next rise in the road.
And as we watched, a motor car appeared, breasted the hill and putt-putted its way towards us. Mary caught my elbow. “There they are!”
The open motor car contained two men – strangers – wearing overcoats and hats.
Behind them, in the luggage compartment, was a large leather box surrounded by metal canisters and rods, cables and lamps: clearly, the paraphernalia of film-making.
The car swept by us into the village and stopped outside The Lamb and Flag. Mary and I hurried to join the crowd which immediately gathered around it, in time to hear Mr Reynolds calling for everyone to stand back and to see one of the men shake his hand. “Afternoon, sir,” he said. “We spoke on the telephone. George Bunniford’s the name, and this is my camera operator, Mr Preston.
Now, where is the best vantage point for viewing the parade?”
Mary and I ran, stumbling a little in our unaccustomed heels, to the corner of the street outside the baker’s. We knew the route the parade always followed. “Moll promised to keep me a place,” Mary told me breathlessly. “And I’m sure there’ll be room for you. You’re only slim, not like her.”
Mary’s older sister Margaret, known as Moll, worked in the baker’s, and took full advantage of the unsaleable cakes at the end of the day. She was actually a pretty girl, and evidently, considering the attention she received from boys, her curvaceous figure enhanced her beauty. Outside the baker’s shop, which was closed today, of course, was a horse trough, over which Moll had had the presence of mind to lay a plank of wood. If the three of us stood on this makeshift grandstand and it held our weight, we would have a good view of the parade as it rounded the corner.
There was only just room for Mary and me. “Now, Sarah,” she warned, “no jumping down there and trying to get in the picture, mind!”
“Couldn’t we do that?” I asked her eagerly.
“No, of course not!”
“Why not?”
“It would spoil the parade, some daft girl running in, wouldn’t it, Moll?”
Moll nodded gravely. “And if the parade is spoilt, they won’t take the pictures, and we’ll never see Haverth on the films. And it’ll be all your fault, Sarah Freebody.”
They were right; it was not our place to try to get into the picture on Florence’s big day. But Mary and Moll had not been surprised that I wanted to. They knew me well; they knew my dreams.
“Look, Sarah, it’s starting!”
I am ashamed to say I did not watch the parade. I missed Florence and the entire May Queen entourage; I missed the colliery band playing “Rhyfelgyrch Gwŷr Harlech” and the ponies with garlands round their necks and the Boy Scouts and the flag-waving and the cheering. I am sure it was all lovely, but to me it was not even there. I followed the movements of the camera operator, Mr Preston, and when I suspected the camera was turning towards me, I smiled at it. Mr Bunniford kept pointing out things he wanted Mr Preston to film, and I kept watching him. I so wanted to be in the newsreel! I wanted so very, very badly to be Lillian Hall Davis on a real screen, not just in my imagination!
101 Pieces of Me Page 1